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The DC Circuit yesterday dismissed the appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality order filed by Verizon and MetroPCS on the grounds that they were filed prematurely – no appeal can be taken until the order is published in the Federal Register, an event that has not yet occurred.
It would be a mistake to regard this as a defeat for the companies. Their decision to file an appeal at this point was a precautionary move taken because of the complex procedural tangle that surrounds issues of finality and appealability. [For the …

While working on a non-DigSoc project, I ran across this statement from the Association of American Railroads:
The U.S. rail model is of “vertical integration,” in which a railroad generally both owns the track and operates trains over that track. The efficient U.S. model has resulted in huge productivity gains, sharply lower average rail rates, and massive reinvestment by railroads back into their systems.
• In fact, from 1980 through 2009, U.S. freight railroads reinvested more than $460 billion — more than 40 cents out of every revenue dollar — back into …

There was a recent article by Sam Biddle called “Facebook is AOLifying the Internet – and That Sucks”. It’s a pretty accurate take on what Facebook has become over the last few years as it considers many of the new features that Facebook has both developed and ripped off. The article itself was probably a slight ripoff of one that John C. Dvorak had produced some months earlier, “Facebook is the New AOL,” that was essentially in the same vein.

The DC Circuit yesterday dismissed the appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality order filed by Verizon and MetroPCS on the grounds that they were filed prematurely – no appeal can be taken until the order is published in the Federal Register, an event that has not yet occurred.
It would be a mistake to regard this as a defeat for the companies. Their decision to file an appeal at this point was a precautionary move taken because of the complex procedural tangle that surrounds issues of finality and appealability. [For the …

[O]nly the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.

As of today, April 1 2011, I am leaving Digital Society and moving to
High Tech Forum.
I would like to thank Jon Henke for this great opportunity to work with him and the rest of my Digital Society colleagues including Mike Turk, Nick Brown, James Delong, Brett Swanson, and Steve Effros. It’s been a great team whose individual and combined intellect I value and I will continue to read their insight.
I also look forward to working with my new colleagues at High Tech Forum who are walking libraries of technical insight. I enjoyed …

Tim Berners-Lee has declared that content should be free and open to all Internet users and that any variation is a violation of the principle of network neutrality. The sentiment is quite different than his explanation of net neutrality some years back.

While working on a non-DigSoc project, I ran across this statement from the Association of American Railroads:
The U.S. rail model is of “vertical integration,” in which a railroad generally both owns the track and operates trains over that track. The efficient U.S. model has resulted in huge productivity gains, sharply lower average rail rates, and massive reinvestment by railroads back into their systems.
• In fact, from 1980 through 2009, U.S. freight railroads reinvested more than $460 billion — more than 40 cents out of every revenue dollar — back into …

Netflix has added some manual control features to the quality of Netflix video streams for Canadian customers who want to stay within their usage caps. To see how this might apply to some US broadband plans with 250 GB or 150 GB usage caps, I’ve generated the following table for daily and monthly allowances.

The 150 GB cap applies to AT&T’s slower DSL customers while the 250 GB plan applies to AT&T U-Verse and Comcast cable broadband. Note that for customers not on U-Verse using the older DSL technology, it is …

A company trying to sell products by scaring the public isn’t anything new, but this time there is the possibility of something good that may come of it. Tawkon has released an unauthorized “radiation” application for jailbroken iPhones. I’ve spent much time debunking the use of the term “radiation” in the context of wireless radio communications, but this application essentially reads radio transmit power and then assigns some arbitrary “danger level” value on a fancy looking meter.
The good news is that an application like this might bring some sense to people about …

Intel launched their new 320 series line of Solid State Storage (SSD) 2.5 inch drives built on the latest 25 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process (Intel Press Release). The new SSD drives bring double the capacity, double the sequential write speeds to 220 megabytes per second (MB/sec), and lower prices per GB.
Note that the sequential capacity measured in MB/sec is frequently confused with the broadband metric of megabits per second (Mbps). 1 MB/sec is 8 Mbps so these SSDs have sequential write speeds of 1760 Mbps. Furthermore, the real benefit of …

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Digital Society is a digital think tank that believes culture and commerce are inseparable, that the digital economy flourishes when people are free and rights are secure, and that free markets free people.

Digital Society is an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization, funded by donations from Jon Henke and from Arts+Labs. We advocate for a pro-culture, pro-commerce digital society through research, analysis and debate on emerging technology issues.

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